Measuring and Harmonizing Coverage, Generosity and History of Work-Injury Policies Globally

I present new measures of generosity, coverage and institutional characteristics of work-injury policy across 189 countries in the Global Work-Injury Policy Dataset (GWIP) version 2.0. To date, major research efforts produced detailed social policy data for the rich Western countries, and more recently countries of Eastern, Central and Central-Eastern Europe. One of the products of this work, the Social Insurance Entitlements Dataset (SIED) has become a benchmark for social policy research. Using hand-coded data, indicators from the International Labor Organization, and the U.S. Social Security Administration’s ‘Social Security Programs Throughout the World’, and computational social science, I demonstrate a process to successfully extend and harmonize the SIED work-injury coverage and generosity variables to cover the Global South; in total 167 countries, plus a further 189 with imputation for the year 2020 or latest. These data will help further various welfare state and social policy research agendas, in particular in the area of work-injury policy which is often understudied in comparison to other social security policies. I analyze to classic hypotheses in welfare state research to demonstrate and guide the potential contyribution of these data. One is a logic of industrialization and the other a cultural values hypothesis about work-injury policy development.